The third slip was stamped October eighteenth and showed a wire of twenty-five thousand dollars.

Altogether, eighty-two thousand dollars had been steadily drained from our personal cash reserve over the past ten weeks.

All three wires had gone straight to an off-site commercial account belonging to a company called Apex Consulting.

I took a red ballpoint pen from the desk tray and opened my spiral notebook to a clean page.

At the top of the page I printed Apex Consulting in clear block capitals.

At ten o’clock on Monday morning I drove down Main Street with the wire dates printed out on three plain sheets of paper.